Girls Canât Wait: Why girlsâ education matters, and how to make it

Briefing paper for the UN Beijing +10 Review and Appraisal

This is the year that the world will miss the first, and most critical of all the Millennium Development Goals â gender parity in education by 2005. Over the next decade, unless world leaders take drastic action now, unacceptably slow progress on girlsâ education will account for over 10 million unnecessary child and maternal deaths, will cost poor countries as much as 3 percentage points in lost economic growth, and lead to at least 3.5 million avoidable cases of HIV/AIDS. In response to this unacknowledged emergency, this paper proposes a new action plan to get every girl in school and learning.